ABSTRACT
The current chapter examines the associations between psychopathy and its subcomponents and various features of emotion regulation (ER). Overall, there is a significant association between psychopathy and ER difficulties. These difficulties are likely to span across several overlapping ER domains, including emotional non-acceptance, poor emotional awareness and clarity, access to limited repertoire of effective ER strategies, difficulties engaging in goal-directed behavior when upset (i.e., poor distress tolerance), and difficulties inhibiting impulsive behavior under emotional arousal (i.e., negative urgency). This pattern seems generally consistent with historical and contemporary conceptualizations of psychopathy. More overt features of psychopathy (i.e., behavioral) are strongly related to emotion dysregulation, also in line with the different contemporary perspectives reviewed earlier. More recent research has extended beyond theoretical expectations by showing that the ER disturbances linked to psychopathy are widespread and not limited to specific ER components, and also that these disturbances are not merely the reflection of general externalizing psychopathology or negative emotionality.
